Revolutionary socialist politics in the era of world capitalist crisis W ent the first of a series of resolutions on

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With this issue of Socialist Action we pres­ key issues in U.S. and world politics that were approved by the elected delegates to the 15th National Convention of Socialist Action, held in Minneapolis last Aug. 16-19. Socialist Action is the fraternal U.S. section of the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky and his collaborators in 1938.

The National Convention was preceded by a lively three-month internal discussion period, in which Socialist Action members in branches and at-large members in some 25 cities engaged in written and oral discussion and debate. Some 120 written contributions were offered for membership con­ sideration. International guests from Fourth Inter­ national groups and friends attended from Greece, Ireland, and Canada.

T ist Action’s 2008 and 2010 National Conventions The Draft Political Resolutions adopted by Social­ explained at length the underlying causes of the worldwide capitalist economic crisis, now in its fourth year. The documents outlined several causal factors, including the long-term decline in the average rate of profit and the associated crisis of overproduction, the intensification of international competition, the finan­ cialization of capital and the associated bursting of the speculative bubbles, and the de-industrialization of the major capitalist countries.

These factors compelled world capitalism to attempt to resolve its inherent contradictions at the expense of the world’s working class and with total disregard of the consequences of the blows inflicted on the earth’s physical environment.

We cited numerous indices demonstrating the grow­ ing and increasingly unpayable debt of the major capitalist powers, enormous deficit budgets, deepen­ ing across-the-board austerity measures, continued weakening of the dollar as the only world currency, the ongoing shift in industrial production from the “central” imperialist nations to the low-wage “periph­ ery,” mounting unemployment, stagnant or regressive GDP “growth,” and more. These dilemmas continue to plague the world capitalist system, with no exceptions.

And these, in turn, give rise to increased imperialist rivalry; militarization of all the major powers; neverending wars; and the re-colonization of continents in the Middle East, Africa, and beyond. They also lie at the root of government and corporate efforts to pro­ vide a worldwide, mobile, near slave-labor or super-exploited “migrant work force” at the service of world capitalism. In order to achieve this, we see govern­ ment-promoted scapegoating—the “war on terror,” anti-immigrant prejudice, sexism, homophobia, rac­ ism, Islamophobia, broad-ranging attacks on civil lib­ erties, and unprecedented and massive global attacks on women.

10 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2012 We begin this first installment of a multi-part se­ ries with Part I of an edited version of the approved Draft Political Resolution (DPR), the document that represents Socialist Action’s assessment of the deci­ sive international and national developments upon which the party’s politics and practice are based.

The remaining sections of the DPR dealing with additional key national and international develop­ ments will be published in separate installments.

In coming issues we will reprint major excerpts from a number of the adopted resolutions dealing with the U.S. antiwar movement, the ecological cri­ sis, women’s liberation, LGBT freedom, and Social­ ist Action’s views on current debates in the Fourth International. Space considerations require that each resolution be abridged.

Those interested in receiving the full text should email [email protected].

There are no exceptions to the horrors underway to­ day. Germany, the most economically powerful Euro­ pean nation, has experienced a steady decline in wag­ es. The U.S. debt, $16 trillion, for the first time exceeds the GDP. China’s double-digit growth rate—which last­ ed many years—has today declined to some 5 percent, while the real U.S. growth rate over the past four years has been close to zero.

The rise in the GDP of the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—masks the im­ poverishment of the great majority of the populations of all these countries. That is, the capitalist-created small layer of “middle class” or higher-paid worker/ consumers, usually in the range of 10-15 percent, pro­ moted to create the semblance of an internal market, has been more than offset by the immiserization of the vast majority.

China’s new generation of “middle-class” consum­ ers, touted by the bourgeois press, is countered by hundreds of millions pressed into a government-controlled transient internal migrant workforce, with virtually no rights. Eighty percent of Beijing’s indus­ trial workers, for example, are migrants, mostly young women from the countryside, who labor at sub-mini­ mum wages aimed at satisfying the competitive needs of Chinese and world capitalism. Half of China’s multinational corporations are U.S.-owned.

The recent exposure of Apple Computer’s superprofits from the exploitation of Chinese workers, on a scale unimagined in the past, shocked more than a few. Apple’s China-based IPhone and IPad factories, employing some 1.2 million workers, were recently exposed as classic super-low-wage sweatshops, with workers forced to labor endless hours on demand un­ der unsafe conditions, including breathing in poison­ ous chemicals.

Apple is a perfect example of what world capitalism has in store for all workers in poor countries, not to mention the United States. It has amassed the largest In attempting to understand the effects of the capitalist economic crisis on the world’s working class, it is useful to look at the dire situation that confronts the Greek masses. Greece, as with all the weaker industrialized capitalist nations—in­ cluding Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and now Italy— lacks the imperial resources to effectively com­ pete on world markets. This said, the same ob­ servation holds for the rest of Europe and indeed the entire world. Never-ending capitalist com­ petition—driven by generalized declining profit rates, shrinking markets, and scarcity of raw ma­ terials—drives all to seek solutions against the others, with the first victims being the weak na­ tions of the underdeveloped world, followed by all the others.

The Greek ruling class has imposed an auster­ ity program that has cut deeper into the standard of living of working people than anywhere in Eu­ rope, although as the Greek Fourth International comrades aptly note, “Greece is Europe’s future.” Some estimates put the decline, including mas­ sive cuts in social services, a series of new and heinous taxes, and wage cuts, all in a myriad of forms, at close to 40 percent.

This has generated some 17 general strikes since the crisis began some four years ago. How­ ever, from the vantage point of the world’s ruling classes, there is no room for any concessions to workers. Few, if any, have been recorded despite unprecedented massive mobilizations. The need to impose even greater cuts at every level of the economy is capitalism’s prime directive and only solution.

Most of the Greek general strikes were pro-forma, merely for the record, but they nevertheless resulted in massive outpourings with huge popular support. They were organized by a trade-union bureaucracy whose intentions were qualitatively more to release pent-up working-class anger and to pose as defend­ ers of workers’ interests than to mount serious efforts to compel a ruling-class retreat. This parasitic layer’s worldview accepts capitalist rule without question; their vision is limited to making the existing capitalist system work.

Greece’s future, as with all other nations, lies not with a pro-capitalist variant of social reform, however left sounding, but rather in a challenge to the capital­ ist system itself. This requires the building of a Lenin­ ist revolutionary socialist party in Greece and every­ where else, as well as mass independent and class-struggle working-class formations.

The various “anti-capitalist parties” and “left fronts” that have emerged in Europe reflect the view that new vaguely defined political formations can become mass organizing vehicles as “left” alternatives to the in­ creasingly bourgeois social democratic parties. Social­ ist Action strongly disagrees with any policy of subor­ dinating the building of Leninist parties, with explicit revolutionary socialist programs, to politically indis­ tinct “anti-capitalist” formations. We discuss these questionable assumptions in various resolutions that Socialist Action has submitted in our fraternal capac­ ity to the Fourth International.

Can China save the world?

By all accounts China’s capitalist economy, inevitably subject to the same contradictions as all the others, is (continued on page 11)

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SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2012 11 ... Socialist politics (continued from page 10)

in decline. Chinese imports in April 2012, for example, rose just 0.3 percent as compared to 11 percent for the same period last year.

China’s export power, the result of low-wage labor and increasingly high technology, the motor forces of its economy, grew 4.9 percent in April, half of the April growth rate the previous year. Other indices demon­ strate the same regression. The almost 50 percent re­ duction in China’s GDP growth, if continued, can have drastic consequences for Chinese and multi-national corporations. That China’s capitalist economy could continue to prosper in the context of a world economy in crisis is problematic at best.

China’s advance, to be sure, has nothing to do with any special Chinese variant of capitalist production, other than its super-low-wage and benefit levels and horrific working conditions, including excessive hours worked under hazardous health and safety con­ ditions. These, of course, are key factors that attract the advanced capitalist world’s investment.

It is increasingly obvious to workers everywhere that the only way for capitalists to compete on world markets is to adopt the Chinese “model.” In the U.S.

this means the classic race to the bottom—the offshoring of jobs and the use of low-wage immigrant and near slave-wage prison labor.

Changing face of world working class The de-industrialization of the major capitalist na­ tions has become a permanent feature of capitalist development. Even the most powerful economies are compelled to take all measures required to maintain competitiveness in increasingly saturated world mar­ kets. Germany, Europe’s strongest economy, has lost 20 percent of its factory jobs from 1991 to 2007. That equals the percentage of manufacturing jobs lost in the U.S. Japan, the manufacturing behemoth of the 1980s, lost 30 percent during the same period. In the U.S., job losses, mostly in better-paid manufacturing industries have exceeded one million per year since 2007.

Workers nevertheless retain enormous power in the major sectors of the economy and can still—if the leadership, will, and unity of purpose are present— shut down their entire country and pose the question of power.

The ruling rich are not lacking in the crudest schemes to lower production costs in the U.S. as well, including the criminalization of a generation of ... Obama’s win (continued from page 1: “Obama’s election victory: The corporate choice to handle capitalist crisis”)

• In the name of “energy indepen­ dence,” the government has projected an increase in the use of fossil fuels of 25-40 percent over the next 10 years, a deathsentence for the environment and mil­ lions, if not billions, of the earth’s people.

President Obama was explicit on his fossil fuel plans during the second presi­ dential debate on Oct. 16. When chal­ lenged by Romney as to who was the best representative of “big oil,” he stated: “We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years. … Natural gas production is the highest it’s been in decades. We have seen increases in coal production and coal employment. … We still continue to open up new areas for drilling. … “We’ve opened up public lands. We’re actually drilling more on public lands than in the previous administration— and the previous president was an oil man. … And natural gas isn’t just appear­ ing magically. We’re encouraging it and working with the industry. … We made the largest investment in clean coal tech­ nology. … We’ve built enough pipeline to wrap around the entire earth once. … So, I’m all for pipelines. I’m all for oil produc­ tion.”

The skilled and highly professional exponents of U.S. capitalism played the two-party election charade to the hilt. The initially “moderate” Massachusetts Republican opponent Mitt Romney was originally cast in the role of a right-wing Tea Party type, presumably to first win the Republican primary contest between assorted representatives of the “extreme right” in U.S. politics.

This had the desired effect of moving the ruling class’s political, economic, and military agenda to the right, affording Obama as much room as required to fol­ low suit. The president eagerly obliged, matching Romney’s corporate agenda nearly word for word, while taking care to enunciate a few sound-bites on occa­ sion to keep his presumed “nowhere to go” supporters on the leash.

It should be noted that several mil­ lion, perhaps 20 million, likely disgusted previous Obama supporters did abstain from voting, with the 2012 popular vote declining below the totals registered in 2008 and 2004.

Upon winning the Republican pri­ mary, Romney’s advisers pulled the plug on his “nowhere to go” supporters and surprised a “deer in the headlightslike” Obama during their first debate by attacking the president from the left. Romney told the truth about the real unemployment rate being much larger than the official figures and otherwise effectively debunked the administra­ tion’s pretensions that a recovery was underway.

The fake debate over the auto bailout was similarly aimed at the naïve. Obama’s multi-billion-dollar bailout was carefully considered by the U.S. ruling class, whose top echelons debated whether the indus­ try should move to bust the historic UAW contracts with General Motors via gov­ ernment-overseen bankruptcy proceed­ ings, wherein a judge would be assigned to gut the UAW contract, or whether the government itself would orchestrate the affair to achieve the very same end.

Regardless of which scenario was con­ templated, neither included ceding the manufacture and sale of autos in the U.S. to any foreign competitors.

GM, formerly the world’s largest cor­ poration, still retains big-time clout in youth, the majority Black and Latino. Virtually every comparison between Blacks and Latinos on the one hand and whites on the other demonstrates that the gap is widening, with unemployment rates among oppressed nationalities close to double the rate of whites. In some predominantly Black and/or Latino cities the unemployment approaches 50 percent.

A corrupt and racist criminal “justice” system, com­ bined with some of the most racist legislation on the books—“stop and frisk” and “three strikes”—helps fill increasingly privatized “for profit” U.S. jails to capac­ ity. Here the ruling rich have found a way to secure triple profits—new prison construction, government payments for prisoner “maintenance” and a near slave-labor wage system (averaging 50 cents per hour nationally).

Today’s prisoners are “employed” by Fortune 500 corporations to produce state of the art commodi­ ties for the world market, and now in the agricultural sector in some cases replacing undocumented immi­ grants at even lower wages!

ruling-class circles. It required one or an­ other clever mechanism to destroy what UAW workers had achieved over decades of class combat.

The auto-bailout charade, a debacle for workers and a boon to the bankers and GM’s corporate elite, was transformed by Obama administration strategists from an election-time minus to a Big Lie plus.

The union-busting president was mi­ raculously transformed into the “friend of labor.”

Similarly, the corporate elite’s “educa­ tion reform,” pro-charter school, priva­ tizing, and anti-teacher president— whose Arne Duncan and Rahm Emman­ uel associates were backed by some of the richest Bill Gates and Co. billionaires in the country—was transformed into an advocate of teachers and public edu­ cation. Duncan is Obama’s secretary of education; Emmanuel, Obama’s former ANTARSYA (Above) Banner of Greek revolutionary coalition ANTARSYA in anti-austerity march in Athens.

The U.S. incarcerates the largest number and per­ centage of its population in the world; 7.1 million are under the jurisdiction of the prison industrial com­ plex. These include workers on probation. Some 3.5 million are in prison today and 3500 are on death row; in both cases, the majority are Black, Latino, and Native American. The nation with the highest GDP and the greatest wealth incarcerates and executes the greatest numbers!

Similarly, women are increasingly victimized as super-exploited workers or as sex slaves around the world. The proletarianization of labor in poor na­ tions in this modern era takes on the most despicable forms, reminiscent of capitalism’s earliest periods when it came into being, as Marx explains, “dripping with blood.”

(to be continued next month)

chief of staff and currently mayor of Chi­ cago, led the charge in the failed effort to break the Chicago Teachers Union.

CBS anchors/analysts covering Elec­ tion 2012 couldn’t help but note that none of the “big issues” were subject to discussion or debate during the two-year campaign. It was “a knife fight,” one opined. I would suggest instead that the campaign was fought with feathers and replete with lies and invention to give the impression that there were serious stakes involved.

In truth, both candidates were sworn in advance to defend and advance the inter­ ests of corporate America. The fact that the very significant majority of voting trade unionists, Blacks (95 percent), and Latinos (75 percent), women, and youth voted for what they mistakenly consid­ ered to be the lesser evil, was more a re­ flection of their compulsion to express, as well as they could, opposition to the worst of what corporate America offered in this orchestrated contest than it was an expression of confidence in the sys­ tem itself. The great majority of Ameri­ cans, the polls indicate, believe that the rich run the country.

Those who voted for one or another of the socialist candidates—on the ballot or write-ins—and who struggle to advance the building of massive, independent, and class-struggle social and political movements, will prove to be the most effective fighters for a better future for humanity.

The gap between the present moment, when workers and their allies are reel­ ing from the corporate offensive, and the time when these movements inevitably emerge to offer a fundamental chal­ lenge—in the electoral arena and in the streets—is drawing closer, the Obama “victory” notwithstanding. n